THE NEED TO REFORM AND DEVELOP THE STANDARD OF OUR 'DEMOCRATIC SYSTEMS.' PART 4.

This apathetic state of affairs is, in my opinion, not easily understood. After all, how can a country which, along with the United States, prides itself in 'democratic values', hold on to the past so strongly? 

And refuses to effect any improvements in how well the government and the state serves the electorate, all of the electorate, and retains 'its people conferred legitimacy to rule over them'? 

So, while a lot of effort and resources are being invested in promoting the creation and accumulation of wealth, and improving the health and education of the citizens of 'democratically backward' countries, such as Britain and the United States, very little or nothing is being done to improve the quality of their 'democracy'? 

This glaring neglect of such an important corner stone of these countries' civil societies is nothing short of amazing and shameful.

So, what kinds of things are needed to make the much vaunted and sacrosanctised 'democratic electoral process' better? 

Well, clearly, it needs to be made to be more representative of the divergent views of the electorate. After all, nations, left unfettered by state dictatorship, whereby only one political party is allowed to freely contest or, rather, imposes itself upon the people, will invariably have more than one political party contesting elections. 

Multi party systems allow the people to have a choice of choosing the party which represents, to whatever degree, their respective views. Thus avoiding the 'lottery type' situation whereby 'the winners takes all' and 'the losers' are having to resign themselves to having their views not represented, as, eg, is the case with the FPTP system, which effectively disenfranchises a significant proportion of the electorate.

There is therefore, the need for the electoral process to not make it too restrictive or financially prohibitive for new political parties to be formed and contest elections. The electoral system should be protected against it becoming 'cartelised' by the dominant parties.

The boundaries of electoral constituencies should be similar in the number of people living within them, so that the votes of each of the electorate has the same value. 

To be continued.